Inside China Tech

Inside China Tech is the South China Morning Post's podcast about China's technology sector. It is built on newsroom conversation. The speakers call themselves technology editors and reporters, and one episode is introduced by Gareth Nicholson, who gives his title as Deputy Technology Editor at the paper. An opening ident sets the frame: a quick collage of sound bites that lands on the line 'Speed and data. And that's where China comes in.' The titles cover a wide spread of the country's tech stories. There is 'Why Huawei has found itself at the epicentre of the US-China tech war.' There is 'TikTok vs Douyin: why does China have its own TikTok?' And there is 'How technology has changed the way we die and mourn', a title that reaches well beyond companies and markets. The Huawei conversation shows how the show handles a contested subject. It takes in a US law restricting American businesses from working with Huawei over national security and espionage concerns, along with a Huawei chairman's charge that Congress acted as judge, jury and executor. It points to the oddity of a company considered safe enough for a role in a new 5G network yet kept away from nuclear sites and military bases. It then sets Ren Zhengfei's statement that he would rather close the company than compromise client data against a Chinese law that binds every Chinese company. The reporters are frank about their limits. None of them, one notes, works for an intelligence agency, so the explanation reaches for a kitchen knife as an analogy for what a telecoms network is. The pandemic runs through several titles. 'How China has turned to tech like never before to combat the coronavirus' follows daily life as it moved online, with hospitals themselves a cross-infection risk and online medical consultations filling the gap. Ping An Good Doctor is cited as passing a billion visits during the outbreak, and apps for working efficiency as gaining nearly 40 million more daily active users. 'Post-Covid-19 world: are online services set to take over?' turns to schooling, weighing access to good teachers regardless of location against the shock for parents when schools moved every class online. One speaker links that to a story the tech desk had picked up: the argument that online education has helped narrow an urban divide. A separate title, 'Online learning: Has the pandemic democratised education in China?', puts that question directly. What comes through is explanation: the business, the politics and the everyday uses of Chinese technology, talked through in plain terms by the people reporting on them.